Bookreader for Digital Library of India Books

07 June 2013 – Bangalore

One of the few avaiable sources of Indian language books online is Digital Library of India. Though they have spent crazy amounts of money in digitizing texts, their technology is really crappy. It is just impossible to read a book on their website.

I was going through an article on pustakam.net, a Telugu website for book reviews, and found a link to a DLI book. And I wanted to see what that book is. Since I knew that I can’t read it on DLI, I spent about two hours time and wrote some code to customize Internet Archive’s bookreader to display books from Digital Library of India. The DLI servers store the images in TIFF format and that is not browser friendly, so one of the things I do is to convert the TIFF image to JPEG on the fly on my server and serve it to the browser.